Focus: You can't say that!

Never call a friend a good egg or assume the chap you see today will not become a woman. Jack Grimston on the latest edicts of the word police

When Ron Atkinson, the football guru, was vilified for his recent racist remarks about a black footballer, some newspapers — including The Sunday Times — obscured not only the word “f******” when quoting him but also “n*****”. They deemed the offensive but archaic n-word as unfit for the naked eye.

Yet within the past month, the BBC did not receive a single complaint after it broadcast an old episode of Fawlty Towers in which the bufferish major cheerfully uses not only the n-word but also another racist epithet.

“Women,” he says, “I knew one once . . . I took her to see India. At the Oval! She kept referring to the Indians as ‘n******’. ‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘N******’ are the West Indians. These people are ‘wogs’.”

Or should that be printed as “w***”? It appears that if the advisers to Lord Woolf, the lord chief justice, have their way, even W*** I******